FREE HAND

Abraham Lincoln moved into Gyo Obata's cluttered architectural study in the fall, and it may be years before he moves out.

Obata must design a $60 million Springfield, Ill., home for the dead president's legacy. Until then, the 75-year-old Obata keeps a head full of Lincoln lore.

"He was very soft and kind in many ways, but when it came to standing for his own goals and for the country, he really stood up," Obata says. "He literally saved this country from being broken in two."

Lincoln represents an ideal of freedom for the Japanese-American architect, whose family suffered 20th Century oppression in U.S. internment camps during World War II.

Obata's passion for the symbolic Lincoln--and his world reputation as a high-caliber architect--earned him the right to design the proposed Lincoln Presidential Library, slated for construction in downtown Springfield soon after the century's end.

Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum Inc. won the contract from the Illinois Capital Development Board in November. Obata, cochairman of HOK and the last of its founders, plans to design the building personally.

In the realm of architects, the project could do far worse than Obata, whose designs include the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Texas.

It was a strange road Obata took, from child of immigrant artists to head of a design firm with 2,000 staff members and offices in New York, Moscow, Shanghai and Prague.

"I had some interest in art, but I had some interest in math and science, so I thought--as a young kid, who knows?--that architecture had both. In the sixth grade, I said I was going to become an architect and somehow stuck with it."

The young Obata enrolled at the University of California in 1941, the year everything changed.

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. In March of that year, the U.S. Army began moving anyone of Japanese ancestry to internment camps, primarily in the desert states.

"A hundred thousand Japanese-Americans incarcerated without any trial, without any sign of guilt or anything. It was all propaganda and prejudice," Obata said.

With a week's notice, his parents, sister and brother were imprisoned in the camp at Topaz, Utah. Gyo Obata won permission to remain free and enroll at Washington University in St. Louis--one of the few U.S. colleges accepting Japanese-American students at the time.

Obata left for St. Louis the day before his relatives were taken from their home. They were released in 1944, but the order that imprisoned them wasn't formally rescinded until 1976.

"This idea of freedom is very important to me," he said.

Obata has no idea yet what he'll design--that will be dictated by the exhibits inside and by the neighborhood. The building also must house the State Historical Library, now beneath the Old State Capitol.